My hovercraft is full of eels...

Mary's ill at the moment, with a nasty cough, so, being the gentleman that I am, I checked in the dictionary for the word for cough. Husten. Unfortunately, my brain gets bored on the way and decides to play chinese whispers with itself, whereupon Husten becomes Hutten, then Hütten.

"Excuse me", I said to the pharmacist, "what do you have for cottages (Hütten)?"

"Pardon?"

"My wife watched (Hüttet). What do you have for her?"

Never mind. I started German lessons again yesterday. Everything will be fine...

Meltdown

So, apparently the swiss obsession with matters nuclear is not not a fear that they will be maliciously blown up, but a more rational fear that some lazy nuclear physicist will accidentally blow them up. As a precaution, when I registered with the swiss government I was given a pack of potassium iodide pills, which I'm assured will save me from the worst of a fallout.

Those of you living in less cautious countries can purchase commercial potassium iodide (in the form of raspberry flavoured Thyroshield if you so wish) from the good people at nukepills.com

Are friends flexible?

So, I've got my visa (so I can start my job properly), and so does Mary (so she can actually come and live here). Today I have to go and see the Fremdpolizei ("Stranger Police" -- stranger you say? stranger than what?) and register my presence. I'm sure it'll all be fine.

Apologies again for the bad sub-title pun (which is, it's a fair cop, the obvious one to make). I tried in vain to come up with a better one than Ealing Tragedy's, but failed. Any suggestions?

New Leaves

Here endeth the time of piecemeal updates at sporadic intervals...

As the dreadful pun in the title of this organ should indicate, Bath Time is over. I feel strangely liberated -- the process of writing a thesis and having it examined took its toll on me. I find myself with time on my hands to do all the things that have escaped me over the past months, such as updating this blog frequently (which SpiritOfTheTin advises lest the Great Rambling One expunge me from his recommended reading for this semester). More monumentally in the world of achievements, I finally finished Gravity's Rainbow, the experience culminating in a mad dash for the finish spread over the entirety of Sunday.

So now I am inhabiting a weird, prison-like building in the south of Bern, photos of which I will attempt to provide shortly. Well, to be fair it's a pretty bourgeois prison, but it does have scary metal blinds, and a really disconcerting cellar. I'm sleeping on an air mattress, and cooking with only one frying pan. Life is odd.